


Crazy, Stupid, Life.

by Bond_Girl



Category: Blade Runner (Movies)
Genre: "We're All Going to Die" Sex, Androids, Fakeout Makeout, Frottage, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, On the Run, Plot Twists, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-14 02:45:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12998130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bond_Girl/pseuds/Bond_Girl
Summary: This is a story of how KD6-3.7 became a real boy.Also, of making out in elevators, spectacularly failed baseline tests, reading Pinocchio, ghosts of enemies past and future, and Deckard's baffling savior streak.





	Crazy, Stupid, Life.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tarlan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tarlan/gifts).



> Title inspired by one of these movies where Ryan Gosling takes his shirt off.

***

A dog was licking K's face.

He blinked, amazed.

Until he realized that this lapping tongue was Deckard's sleeve, wiping the fresh snow off his face. K tried to sit up on the steps and remembered: fully impaled by rebar through stomach, multiple stab wounds, multiple broken ribs.

Status: just let me die, he wished.

A rolling wave of weakness took over him, to Deckard shouting obscenities in the distance.

 

***

 

The next few times K woke up, they were flying.

Sometimes, low over the dark puzzle pieces of a city split open by street lights. Sometimes, the main road was far away, a bright crayon line across the night valley. Sometimes he'd wake up to Deckard peeling off his bandages and he'd hear himself shout.

Not from physical pain: K had a combat-grade pain threshold.

The events of the last days kept coming back and punching him in the face:—Luv's dominance, delivered in brutal blows and in a savage kiss—Joi that he could never rebuild from scratch because it seemed like betrayal—a childlike peace on Mariette's face while she was sleeping—a sterile wonderland of Ana Stelline's cage where nothing except herself was real.

When K finally came to himself, it was the middle of a night. He was in a bed with a lumpy pillow, and somebody was snoring on the other side of the wall.

With a grunt, he got up and limped out into a low-ceilinged, dim tunnel of a room that had a sheer drop onto a blinding canyon of a thousand billboards: _The Last Ostrich on Earth.—Watch Buster Friend and His Friendly Friends.—How To Spell Compaq.—Drink Coke Gravity on the Golden Gate Bridge._ —There was a hologram of a dancing cowboy on the left, two dancing cops in leather on the right.

The snow was blowing up, down, and sideways inside the snowglobe of this busy bright world.

So either hell froze over. Or, they were in San Francisco.

 

***

 

Next morning the first thing K said to Deckard was, "Why aren't you with your daughter?"

"We keep in touch," Deckard stated mysteriously and hauled K onto his feet.

A shower seemed like a good idea, but taking off clothes and boots felt like too much of an effort. Also, Deckard's concerned face and helpful attitude kept getting in K's way.

"Did Freysa send you to kill me?" Weary, K nodded the affirmative and Deckard chuckled. He was looking positively thrilled with this piece of news and with having to literally cut K out of his blood-soaked shirt and grimy pants. "Tough bird, that one."

In the shower K screwed eyes shut, bracing himself for brutal cleansing jets. Instead, it was set to gentle. Deckard let him stay under it forever, to soak away the grime and the pain. It was incredibly wasteful and unethical to run showers this way, but as K could barely hold upright, he figured he could cut himself some slack.

He felt Deckard's palm on his skin, a startling circle of heat over a bruise.

"Goddamn, Joe." Deckard still acted like K's pain mattered. Even though he'd seen K get up again and again, a tinplate soldier, killed a hundred times over. "It looks like you're a brick wall that won a fight with a wrecking ball. Gotta have hurt."

It was only after Deckard left him alone with a clean pile of clothes and as K was staring blankly into a fogged-up mirror, that K realized that Deckard also kept calling him by name.

This kind of thing was making him feel _special_. K knew fine well he was undeserving. He wasn't even a savior to his kind, just another blunt little instrument. Worse, this kind of thing was making K _feel_. K had only signed up to be another cog in a grinding machine of the revolution, not for that whole feelings business. He got emotional once and look where it landed him.

The next morning K tried to politely thwart more of Deckard's cheerful resolve to care for him. K was proud of how low maintenance he was. After all, it was part of LAPD's key specification for his model. The more he spoke about it, about his time with the police department and his backstabbing neighbors, the more it seemed to make Deckard angry or to drive him to drink.

K decided to drop it, along with all conversation.

This was the biggest apartment K had ever lived in. There were _three_ bedrooms. They appeared to be the only occupants on this floor—people had either left for warmer pastures or for the off-world paradises like Aurora or Helicon.

Sometimes he opened the door and listened to a mocking whistle of the wind through the deserted building. Though their apartment was on a higher floor, the unlit corridors felt subterranean. Deckard kept constantly scouting for furniture or appliances in abandoned apartments, so very soon their third bedroom started to resemble a junkyard.

They had a lot of time on their hands.

K spent most of it letting his bioengineered body recover at a speed that seemed to shock Deckard. Deckard spent most of it drinking the apparently subpar whiskey at a speed that should have been concerning to K, in hindsight.

Generally, Deckard was crap company. He either eyed K like he was expecting him to collapse from wounds at any moment, or he only spoke in sarcastic one-liners. He frequently disappeared into the city for hours on end, coming back with wads of cash and getting K's reflexes all fired up whenever a door squeaked open.

One night at dinner Deckard slid a yet another bowl of glass noodles and protein across the length of the table. Some of it splashed in a sloppy trail, the only thing connecting them, total strangers who saved each other's lives once. K chewed, dearly missing the variety of his holographic dinners. And pleasant conversation.

"If you don't like my chow, we can go downstairs to a noodle shop and get ourselves some good old-fashioned food poisoning there," offered Deckard. His stare was about to drill a hole in K's obstinate forehead. "Might be good for you to stretch your legs. Breathe some of that good city stink. Get into a fight. You gotta start living, kid."

"Thanks, I'm good." K pushed away the unfinished bowl. He went to his room to lie face to the wall and watch a long jagged crack. It appeared after he had punched the wall that one time because he still didn't know how to deal with being a pressure cooker of emotions.

The next night Deckard declared they were out of food and had to go down to a sushi shop or a taco truck or a pierogi palace—or to starve. It was as transparent as anything, but K decided not to employ his interrogating skills to obtain this confession and so he let Deckard help him to tug on his new boots.

He grabbed Deckard's rather vintage blaster on the way out as an afterthought.

 

***

 

The smell of the noodle truck was thick enough to knock you out.

Deckard was in high spirits, taking his sweet time to banter with the proprietress in cityspeak and to discuss what was on and most importantly, off the menu. He knew his Cantonese food, but he insisted on haggling in a heavily accented Russian that neither haggling parties spoke too well. It couldn't possibly have been this much fun.

Silently hunched on his stool, K was determined not to enjoy this and scanned the crowd for trouble and the street for exits. His back was freezing and his front was broiling from the cook's stove. Deckard kept trying to involve him by offering endless choices: garlic or mushrooms, steamed or pan-fried, oyster sauce or extra spicy.

At the first taste of the crunchy, smoky, too-spicy goodness even K cracked a smile. This earned him a second helping from the cook and a round of applause from Deckard that almost drowned out the sounds of a fight in the speakeasy above.

Just as K was considering changing his mind about tonight, a body slid down a weather-worn awning above their heads and put an end to that thought. It was obviously a street worker, just another replicant and the crowd didn't spare it a second look, but suddenly a lot more bodies, gangster and molls, fighting or fleeing, were spilling out of the windows and into the slushy road where bicycles and spinners swerved wildly to avoid them.

K squashed his law-enforcing instincts down. It wasn't his business any more than any other good Joe's on the street. This was a simple ecosystem. Racketeers did the racketeering. Cops looked the other way. Prostitutes got beat up. That's what it was. K's new mission was to lay low and to protect his knowledge of only the biggest secret in the universe.

Of course, Deckard did the opposite of laying low. Seemingly on a streak to save all androids ever rolled out into existence, he slid off his stool without finishing his bowl—and kicked the largest gangster right where it counted. Predictably, other gangsters decided to take personal offense at that. Some innocent bystanders got tangled up in all the punching.

Between bites, K turned his head to observe the fight: it didn't look like Deckard had an upper hand, but it also didn't look like he was losing.

K was _not_ going to interfere.

Not even for the father of the Resistance who really should have known better. Never mind that the blaster inside K's jacket was burning him like a guilty conscience. Struggling with a yet another uncalled-for fit of emotion, he rubbed his face with his hands. Law Enforcement Officer (model Nexus-9) was supposed to be obedient and good-natured, only capable of violence in order to uphold the law or to obey authority. Not to be a super trouper. Comforted by that thought, he swirled more noodles around his fork.

A leg flew by, unattached to a person or an android.

K fervently hoped it was a prosthetic and sent the forkful into his mouth. He tasted the heady broth with a weird relish, all spices in it suddenly highlighted by the storm of his feelings and the strength of his resolve to stay out of it.

Then in the cacophony, K heard a yelp. It was Deckard. And he was in pain.

Hearing it was like grabbing a live wire, K's mind short-circuiting the circuits he technically didn't even have. He wasn't trained to care. And yet. Deckard was making him care by making K's kind his business without calculation. Ana Stelline was making him care by sharing her real memories with K for no good reason but to help him stand stronger. The mysterious Rachel was making K care because she had to have seen some spark in Deckard to fall in love with him.

This entire goddamn family was going to be the end of K and of all the rules in the handbook.

With a sigh, K threw the exact amount of money at the counter and got up, filling out into all of his height and shoulder span for the first time since he had laid himself down on the snowy steps and decided to die.

He stepped into the swirl of it.

 

***

 

It was chaos, like all human fights.

K dropped on one knee and the world spun around him, pinprick lights blurring into lines. Three attackers—clumps of bystanders—a little girl without her parents—Deckard. K's arm thrust up. The blaster recoil jolted twice through his bones—the joy of being really good at something was physical.

He stopped the third attacker in mid-jump, by the throat.

And was sorely tempted to knock out Deckard before he got them into any more trouble.

It was all over, all too soon.

This display of extraordinary force created an unnatural vacuum around K, people pressing away, many eyes staring in fear and awe at the perfect arc of his body. It was something most of them had only seen on TV: the souped-up combat models were rarely at large in the cities, blade runners were discreet, and the rest of K's kind… they obeyed.

For some wild reason K had his gaze locked on that little girl, seeing his reflection in her wide brown eyes as her parents were running over to comfort her. Without words, he could tell: for a child too small to know better, K wasn't a skinner, a cop, or a presumed-dead deserter. He was a hero. The implication shook him, turning into whole body shudders.

He became aware of Deckard running up to him, asking about his ribs, calling him Joe, and dragging him off into a side street. They tore through the rising blizzard until they lost everyone's attention and then doubled back, sneaking home through a side entrance.

All the while, K was shaking: his kind didn't run.

He could have really done with a baseline test here. Those had a tendency to numb, to sort through the emotional rubble. Because right now? K was so drowning in emotion, he could hardly breathe.

Deckard seemed to have mistaken it for a physical weakness because there it was, his arm around K's shoulders. He was directing K left or right as they hurried through long empty corridors, flashlight dancing wildly over the swirly dusty carpet.

 

***

 

Was it a day? It was _a day_.

Up in the apartment sleep seemed like an alien concept, so K walked up to the wall of windows. In the distance, building-tall holograms flirted with midnight passers-by.

K knew it was time: to face it, to make sense of himself again, to make _whole_. Even if making sense of things would mean leaving the past and the people in it behind.

Tonight he made a choice based on emotion, a choice against his better judgment. Such a primal call couldn't have possibly been put into him by a lab. Those irrational attachments, real memories—all grown from a small seed Ana had planted in him.

There was this little part of him now: real.

K was still shaking with the adrenaline, aching with a physical need for relief. On a crazy impulse, he pulled down his zipper and put his hand in there. 

He was hard.

He'd been hard before, regularly and often in the mornings for no obvious good reason. Sometimes after a successful retirement. Sometimes when he felt attraction. So even this part of him was as real and irrational as that of a human. Wallace, _the maker_ , had put it there in working order along with a heart and a brain. Even though LAPD didn't really have a need for K's dick to function or to have feelings. So K could hurt, he could die, he could love, he could fuck, what was the difference between KD6-3.7 and a real boy after all.

He started crying silently and he just couldn't stop. It was too much, like his body had finally caught up with his mind and found it as broken as his ribs.

Mind in tatters and dick in hand, K still couldn't bring himself to reach for that very human comfort. It felt like trespassing onto his own body, taking ownership of it. To finish what started the other night with Joi and Mariette.

"For crying out loud," somebody said far too close behind his back. It was Deckard. He reached around to bat away K's clueless hand and to apparently deal with the unresolved matter of tears and a hard-on.

K's face flushed hot—at the crossroads between shame and arousal. He didn't know why this was happening, and if he needed to see Deckard's expression or if he was afraid of it.

At least, K's body didn't mind. It wasn't even surprised, just needy. It ached for the jerky slide, the rough grip, for somebody _giving_.

His head fell back, cheek burning up from the pleasant rasp of another man's stubble. Touching people without punching them was fraught with surprises like that and K swayed on his feet. It only made their bodies come closer, sharing heat.

K heard himself moan low.

"There, there." Deckard's voice was steady. "Let it all out."

Unsure if he was safe or exposed, K felt lost: a solid, inscrutable, _real body_ behind—but a safe and flickering sea of virtual pleasure of hologram advertisements ahead. If he closed his eyes just so, he could almost get the familiar dancing silhouette in focus...

"You want it or not?" said Deckard, unhelpfully ruining the remains of a fantasy.

K groaned and pushed with a sudden demand, into the calloused hand - and back against a sturdy chest and an only slightly softer give of Deckard's hips. Yes, he wanted it. And just like that, urgent and knowing.

It only took a moment until the fireball of the release, hot and startling, burned clean through him.

For a moment K tried to catch his breath, barely aware that he was resting his weight on Deckard. Who was uncharacteristically silent. K half-turned and uncertainly reached for Deckard's fly. Life was all about a quid pro quo, and K had already run some serious debt here.

K had sex with humans before and he often physically enjoyed it, but never without a feeling that it was a service he was providing. A human's touch, uniquely for K's pleasure wasn't something he understood, not something he could easily get over.

"Get your hands off me." Deckard looked incredulous. Change that to offended. Now, to defensive. "I just get tired of seeing your maudlin face moping, in every room, around the clock." He put his hands on his hips, suddenly querulous. "Get over yourself, kid. A pretty face doesn't mean anything to me."

K just stood there, totally out of his depth, and wondered if he was about to get punched in the face.

Sure, he could still take Deckard and those human reflexes, but it was a distant professional thought that had little to do with how K felt. His legs were pleasantly wobbly, his body still pulsing hot from the sex.

For a while, the only sound was the heavy breathing of their confused stand-off and a faucet dripping somewhere in the apartment.

"If you speak about this to me again—" Deckard stuck his stubby finger in K's face with a overly menacing huff. It seemed rude to mention K had never even opened his mouth. "If you do that, next time anybody sees your pecker, it'll be chopped up and served with the mystery stew down at Madame Wong's."

He turned around unsteadily and stumbled off into the unlit labyrinthine depths of the apartment's three rooms, mumbling about being stuck here with a stupid kid and no good whiskey. The now familiar clink of glass against bottle was a signal that Deckard would be just fine. Also, a fuck-off.

K still had his hands in the air and his pants halfway down his hips. He was thinking about a thousand new and unexpected ways of how the world had turned on its head lately. That night he fell asleep as soon as his head hit the lumpy pillow.

In the morning Deckard woke him up before sunrise and declared that as K's pretty mugshot was all over the morning shows on most television channels, they had to get moving. K didn't even stop to think about how it was the first morning he didn't feel like he was scooping up pieces of himself off the floor.

 

***

 

Apparently, Deckard had lived in San Francisco in his other life.

So he knew a man who knew a man who knew of a conveniently temporary vacant apartment in a magnificent older building in a high-prestige neighborhood, right in the shadow of the SFPD tower. Nobody would look for fugitives right under their noses, and that was their great and flawless plan.

Before they left their old digs, Deckard insisted on K bleaching his hair in the sink for a better disguise. With now straw-blond hair and his regulation mildly-attractive looks, K now looked like he stepped out of a toothpaste commercial. Cryptically, Deckard huffed, "You remind me of someone. And not in a good way." He kept shooting K odd glances. And not in any way that seemed to have anything to do with whatever had transpired between them in one of the most confusing and erotic hours of K's life.

They appeared in front of a doorman with a bravado that was radiating off them like dirty bomb fallout. K was sporting fashionably large protective goggles and a transparent raincoat of a kind favored by people who cared more about their looks than a range of motion. It wasn't like he had an alternative: K's old trusty blade-runner coat had visible stab holes in it anyway.

Deckard came dressed as himself, only changing his attitude—instead of querulous and sarcastic, he exuded authority and somehow, class. Even his voice changed, now booming through the grand entrance hall under the ostentatiously lit chandeliers. He told the doorman that they were visiting from the East Coast metro, here for the auction of the last live ostrich and a pair of guinea pigs for breeding. They would be staying at the Joneses and their bags would be arriving later.

This kept K mildly amused. Until he saw cop spinners speeding through the heavy snowfall just outside the majestic building's entrance. Without slowing down his rare species monologue, Deckard reached out and put a hand over his—either in comfort or to stop K from being twitchy and reaching for his blaster. His hand was cold, but K flushed hot, then warm from this sudden confirmation of their intimacy.

After his palm was sufficiently greased, the doorman bought Deckard's story, hook, line and sinker.

Now _this_ was the largest apartment K had ever lived in. Everything was in saturated, dramatic shades of red. There were six bedrooms, three bathrooms and a kitchen bigger than the entire place he'd had with Joi. Some bedrooms had huge poster beds and sheets of crimson satin. 

After five minutes of lying spreadeagled and staring at the tile-decorated ceiling, K decided that even if he was still strictly low maintenance, he'd sleep in one of these unethically big beds just to expand his horizons about how the other half lived.

Deckard, of course, had already settled in the most strategically located bedroom, closest to both exits and the kitchen. He rustled himself up quite a bar and set out his framed family pictures of Rachel and now, of Ana. His capacity of being at home everywhere was a kind of thing that K quietly envied.

In the evening K wandered into a library room of lacquered furniture and rows upon rows of what looked like vintage editions. Deckard was sitting cross-legged, his nose in a book and his hand pouring a precise glass of vodka without even looking.

"What are you reading?" asked K, awkwardly settling down in another of these plush armchairs. His legs almost tangled with Deckard's. If his face looked suddenly flushed, it was the fault of all this rich velvet reflecting on his skin.

"Pinocchio." Deckard showed the spine. "It's about a puppet who dreamed of—"

"Becoming a real boy. I know." This felt too close to home and to being assaulted by more unwelcome emotions, but here in this luxurious and safe apartment, K felt like talking. "Why do you care about the androids so much?"

Deckard looked at him pensively as if considering whether to tell K to get lost in one of the six bedrooms or to actually answer. His lip was still split from yesterday's fight and bleeding a little.

"Because you're people," finally said Deckard. "Where it counts."

Apparently satisfied with his own answer, Deckard took a sip out of his glass. A drop of his blood swirled red in the crystal clear liquid and K watched, transfixed.

"In that way, too." Deckard must have read his expression. "You bleed. You choose. You love. It's what makes us human."

K looked away. Part of him hurt, part of him felt awash with heat and longing.

There was silence for a minute, then Deckard gave him another of his startlingly sober looks. "What is it about cells interlinked? You kept talking about it at night, early on. A tall white fountain, some other bullshit. I thought your superconductive-quantum-infinity-magical brain broke."

K flinched. So only a few days ago, he had been like a lost dog, begging to get his leash back? He didn't want Deckard to look at him this way. "This doesn't sound like anything to me."

"Pinocchio, he lied a lot and so his nose grew. Don't let it happen to you," Deckard said meaningfully, holding up the book. "Though I probably shouldn't mind that you have your secrets now, Joe. Wallace didn't want your kind to lie. Hell, he didn't want your kind to step out of line. Yet here you are, charting your own course, balls to the wall."

"I get to ask questions, too." Something had been on K's mind ever since he ran through a wall in Vegas. "What about your dog? You think he made it?"

"He was never my dog," huffed Deckard. "He just turned up one day. Anyway, the girl took him in. With pink hair? Sweet on you."

K rediscovered that he had a beating heart. "She's better off without me. Maybe in another life."

Deckard inspected his face for far too long, then reached into his pocket and produced a wooden horse. The same toy that had been the source of a seismic shift in K's life, now laid so peacefully in the crook of Deckard's palm.

"Ana says, finders keepers." He stood it up in a precarious balance on K's knee.

Gingerly, K wrapped his fingers around the rough-hewn wood and found it kept some of Deckard's body warmth. It could be the first thing he owned in this new life. Even his gun was technically Deckard's.

He reached over and picked a book from a stack that Deckard had already read. It was a battered copy of Don Quixote. Deckard was already reading or pretending to read, and K thought he might as well. They sat there until it was bedtime. Their knees were leaning against each other, and this was real.

Over the next week they fell into a pleasant domestic routine: get up late, do their own thing, have meals together (and either Deckard was a better company now or K had lowered his standards, but their dinner conversations were an improvement, even fun), then read until one of them would be falling asleep in his ruby velvet armchair.

K never asked Deckard about his time spent with Mr. Wallace. That man literally made K; an absent, indifferent, omnipotent creator—not father. It wasn't something he could handle right now.

At night K would lie there in the complete darkness and allow himself the full extent of his new capacity for feelings: to remember, reflect, hope. Thankfully, with every night there was less of an urge to break something.

Sometimes, he touched himself. Not necessarily in that way, but K was getting to know himself for the first time. This body was his now, not the Corporation's. It was a good body, in a top physical shape. Most of his scars had regenerated into a perfectly smooth skin, but not all of them, not from the most recent encounter in the icy waves of the Pacific. K liked these imperfections the most, they were making him real.

Oh, and while he was there, K started liking getting himself off. Sometimes he thought of Deckard's rough palms, of his exasperated but caring voice in K's ear. K knew he wanted it to happen again, god, but he didn't know what to do about. He didn't even know where to _start_ doing anything about it, and he was hoping that Deckard would come back—and just do it for him, again. To him. With him, whatever. But the door remained shut, every night.

It felt like a beginning to a fine life full of possibilities, but something in K's superconductive-quantum-infinity-magical brain was telling not to get used to this.

Trouble was on its way.

 

 ***

 

One very ordinary evening K went for takeout and ran into Deckard on the street. Seeing a now familiar silhouette, carelessly carrying a new bottle of his absurdly expensive whiskey, and that crooked grin, K felt so fond of him he could burst. But he didn't—burst. Because K was almost a pro at having feelings now.

They fell into small talk for the passing neighbors' benefit, entered the elevator in step. K raised his hand to push a large backlit button for their floor when...

There was a distinct sound of heavy feet running.

K could recognize a stampede of cop boots anywhere. Of course with their luck, there was literally no exit. One glance at K's face and Deckard started reaching for his blaster. In these close quarters, inside a metal box of an elevator, this was suicide. K grabbed his wrist, stopped it without trying too hard.

Lieutenant Joshi had always said that distraction was another tool in a good detective's box.

He turned to Deckard, cupped his bristled cheek in his hand, and said, "I swear this has nothing to do with the time you put your hands on me and I liked it."

Deckard's jaw literally dropped a little at that. Before the contrary nature of his caught up and ruined the plan, K braced his legs wide, grabbed Deckard's shoulders for courage, and started kissing like both of them were on a death row. This last part didn't need to be faked.

Deckard tongue tasted like the hard and bitter liquor he favored—the kind that would rush to your head, pool sweetly in your lower belly, instantly make your legs weak. The kind that made you needy and a little unstrung. K really should have gone to Deckard's room any of the past nights and found that out earlier. K really should have known how he—

It was a wrong fucking time for introspection as K became hyper aware of two policemen entering the elevator behind his back.

Deckard finally got the memo: he grabbed K's behind with a fantastically dirty intent and ground into him with such raw intensity that K honestly gasped and one of the cops whistled. Out of the corner of his eye K could now see themselves in the mirror: kissing open-mouthed as Deckard's hands were pushing the shirt up on his back, enough for a flash of skin. Seeing himself like that—wanted, eager—was undoing K.

The policemen backed out, probably looking for one runaway replicant or for one wanted former blade runner, not a major case of PDA in a luxury elevator. The heavily decorated doors closed on them with a soft ding.

Alone now, but K was physically unable to stop. His mind was _blown_. His body wanted to _fuck_. Deckard's hands were under his shirt, very obviously exploring, in a way that would have been telling if K's brain was there to observe. His hips were fused to riding that hard line in Deckard's pants, his hand grabbing the back of Deckard's neck with one single need.

This—between them—was really happening, whatever this was. Worst possible place, worst possible time, but that kind of thing came with teaming up with Deckard.

Just as Deckard seemed to be working himself up to use words, the elevator's sobering ring announced their arrival home. Maybe they should have got off on a different floor, maybe climbed out through a tile in the elevator ceiling, but K wouldn't have traded this last breathless minute of _living_ for anything else.

Now it was time to fight.

He pushed himself off Deckard. His eyes were clear, his best gun-hand steady and his posture handbook perfect. He was ready for whatever enemy might be behind those doors.

 

***

 

It was worse than even K could have predicted: their doorman, flanked by what looked like a dozen open-mouthed cops in wet slickers, staring into the barrel of K's lonely blaster. "There he is, the old drunk," the guy shrieked. "Always buying the same expensive liquor. And there's his boy toy!"

K shoved Deckard down on the floor and shot first, into the thick of the bodies. Deckard's forgotten whiskey bottle rolled out in a dramatically slow motion, past the open doors, onto the wine-red carpet. Never predictable, Deckard started reaching out for it, but the elevator doors thankfully started to close to an abrupt drumroll of cop blaster shots against the solid ancient metal.

"I'm not old." Still on the floor, Deckard was having an untimely fit of hurt feelings. Humans, really. "And you're nobody's toy. Bigotry, that's what got us all in this mess, I'm telling you."

"There's a way from this roof onto another building." K said distractedly, calculating three to four possible routes for their escape. "I checked it the day we moved in. Even you could make the jump."

Deckard got up, dusting himself. "I really have to stop to going to roofs of extremely tall buildings with androids on the run," he muttered cryptically. "This can only end in tears. And rain."

"Are you drunk? If you're drunk, I won't carry you." K's mouth still felt tender and so dangerously willing. He'd have carried Deckard out of a blazing inferno, but he didn't have words for feelings like this.

The elevator spat them out into the driving snow on a dark roof. They went out, but could only run a few steps before the floodlights blinded even K's eyes. "Surrender now!" shouted somebody into a megaphone. Judging by the amount of laser pointers redrawing their bodies like paper targets, the entire city police force came to the party.

"Ok, definitely not like the other time on the roof," said Deckard. Still, he looked bullish like he was about to take on this new enemy, barehanded and head on.

K made a quick step, to shield Deckard with his body. And there he was struck by an electric shock of a kind that he'd never known. It laced through his veins and made him fall to his knees in agony. Grabbing his throat with an invisible lasso, the pain made it hard to breathe.

Behind a soft curtain of blowing snow, the fluorescent letters SFPD on the cop slickers began to blur and dance together like an underwater crowd of jellyfish. The last thing he saw was that Deckard was getting punched in the face.

 

***

 

K woke up in a holding cell full of other replicants.

It was the usual array of pleasure models and domestic help, detained for small misdemeanors or perceived disobedience. They gave him a side-eye and wide berth when he got up and started pacing: the word about K's previous occupation must have gotten out. Deckard, being human, was understandably nowhere to be seen but worryingly, not even heard. It was very unlike Deckard not to make noise. As K wasn't going to shoot the crap or debate android rights with his cellmates, he sat on the floor in the safest corner, held the wooden horse warm in his palm, and _worried_.

Soon enough, a mousy official character in an ill-fitting uniform showed up with an information tablet and started reading identification numbers in a bored monotone. He released some cases, processed others for offences that K's mind soothingly catalogued for no good reason but to maintain the appearance of calm.

When it was K's turn, the official stared at his tablet for so long that K's entire short life had flashed through his eyes twice.

"You are registered as retired, KD6-3.7," the official finally said in the particular tone of a displeased bureaucrat. "Very irregular. Let's have you tested."

K got up to his feet and failed to look harmless, judging by the flash of fear in the mousy human's eyes.

In a standard post-traumatic baseline testing room, there was only a plastic chair and a Voight-Kampff box, staring out of a white wall with an all-seeing, indifferent, unblinking eye. How hard could it be not to feel? K used not to feel all the time, this should be a piece of cake.

A voice from a speaker above his head began walking K through the familiar back-and-forth of questions and answers. At first, finding the old groove was easy enough.

 _"Were you ever arrested?"_ —Cells.  
_"Did you spend much time in the cell?"_ —Cells.  
_"Do they keep you in a cell?"_ —Cells.

 _"When you're not performing your duties do they keep you in a little box?"_  
Against himself, K flashed back to his old apartment of loneliness and bare concrete. — "Cells. Interlinked."

 _"Do they teach you how to feel finger to finger?"_  
The ghost of Joi, Mariette's soft hand, and Deckard's rough, tender grip. —"Interlinked."

 _"Have they left a place for you where you can dream?"_  
Since finding out that he was made and not born after all, K had been having the same nightmare: he'd slice his arm open and watch the steel mechanism of his bones move under the wet layer of an unnatural pink flesh. —"Interlinked."

 _"What's it like to hold your child in your arms?"_  
K hoped to god Deckard now knew. —"Interlinked."

 _"What's it like to play with your dog?"_  
His fingers sniffed by a wet and friendly nose. —"Interlinked."

 _"Do you feel that there's a part of you that's missing?"_  
Was there an engineered part of K's Nexus-9 mind that was walling him off from embracing life? K's fist clenched, knuckles white. —"Interlinked."

 _"Do you have a heart?"_  
Who wrote this crap?! Obviously, K had a heart. Both physically and figuratively. What if K got retired here and Deckard would never know that these past few weeks, he had made that little heart of K's beat faster and happier. —"Within cells interlinked."

K wasn't even trying anymore. He was so off baseline, they would need new and special charts just for him, but no part of him felt scared.

_"Why don't you say that three times?"_

"Go to hell," said K, got up, and punched the white box right into the wall, through plywood and plaster.

"Wow, you failed that one, son," said the unseen employee with something like admiration.

K didn't remember anything after this because he got tasered all over again.

 

***

 

K came to himself because he was being unceremoniously flung on the floor, hitting it hard. He kicked up from the ground onto his feet, his head ringing.

There was nothing but a claustrophobically small room with two bunk beds, a sink, and no windows.

"Welcome aboard shuttle Discovery, kid." Deckard was sitting on the lower bunk, his cheekbone freshly bruised but otherwise looking in a fine fighting shape.

"Destination: Moon, then a cruise for Eos. Part of the Grand Tour, Once In A Lifetime Getaway, in case you skipped this travel brochure." He balled it up and threw into the corner of the cabin. "The number on your eyeball read that you're retired and if found, your body needs to be sent back to the corporate. Somebody whispered in SFPD's ear that I should come along."

Eos, the planet owned entirely by Niander Wallace.

Heavy with the feeling of being completely and utterly fucked now, K sat down on the bunk next to Deckard. Sure, he could try and break the door out, but there was nowhere to run in space. They both stared at the merry font on the crumpled brochure for what seemed like an eternity.

"You know I'll be retired as soon as we meet my maker, right?" K broke the silence with what what he wished was a neutral statement of facts delivered in an even tone, but judging by Deckard's reaction, it was not.

Deckard made some kind of sound and reached out for K's hand. Their fingers entwining easily, he let it fall onto K's knee. It was unbelievably good to hold onto someone like that, in simple comfort mixed up with a whole lot of longing. Staring down at how their fingers fit, knuckle to knuckle—feelings trapped in the warm space between their palms, K thought out loud, "I've always wanted you to do that." _—Finger to finger._

Deckard instantly squeezed his fingers in response, and that smallest display of affection decided it. K turned, easily twisting around to straddle Deckard's lap. There was something he absolutely had to live before it was lights out, game over for him.

"This isn't the best time for that kind of thing," Deckard may have said the words, but his eyes were soft. His hands seemed unable to stop, sliding up and down K's hips.

"It never is," said K.

This time their kiss was the kind of slow that stayed unhurried but ran deep, took your heart and soul out and put it back the right way. When it was over, it ended the holding back and the confusion.

K took Deckard's hands and put them on his body, silently asking to pull his shirt off for him, and Deckard ran his fingers over K's bare back and chest, his eyes watching the play of muscle.

"What?" whispered K.

"You are a god, did anybody tell you that?" Deckard's voice had a catch to it. "So much more than skin deep, sure, but damn."

In his former life K would have recoiled from the s-word, but he was no longer living that life. It was his _skin_ and he loved having somebody's hands on it. He put his palm flat on Deckard's chest, feeling the other man's heart race underneath. It longer mattered how these bodies, skin and sinew, came to be about.

Deckard put his hand over the vee of K's pants and squeezed gently. He held K's entire fucking aching being in his hand—and instead of stroking, he stared at K's face with some unreadable human emotion. It wasn't like K wasn't dying for this to get going or anything.

With an impatient short moan, K grabbed the upper bunk with one hand and pulled himself up enough to start riding Deckard's hips. For a minute Deckard was looking up at him with eyes so dark that it was making K's heart fall, fall, fall into that dizzy, deep pit of his stomach.

"Joe," whispered Deckard. " _Joe_."

K bit his lip raw to keep himself from coming just from the sound of his own name.

He let Deckard unzip and take them both out, and that was when K had to have his mouth again. The heat of their cocks rubbing together, their tongues searching, and the pleasure unraveled brighly in the pit of K's stomach. It pulsed through him, both bone-deep and skin tingling, and it kept coming and coming, rolling over, until Deckard joined him and everything was lost in a soft fusion of their mouths.

After, they laid on the bunk, arms and legs tangled. Without being too aware of it, K always put himself between Deckard and doors.

"Anything else on your bucket list, Joe?" Deckard had a softer look than K had ever seen on him. "Forget your maker. What are your dreams?"

K passed a hand over his eyes. He was positive his expiration date was just around the corner, but Deckard was asking him to ignore the odds? K had been acting so much like a human lately, what was another irrationality.

"I want to play with a dog all day," he blurted out the first thing that came to his mind. "My dog with muddy paws. Big, yellow, silly kind of animal. Throw a ball on the lawn. I saw that in an old movie."

"What else?" Deckard's palm traced down the length of K's shoulder, arm.

"I'd like to find another way to be a benefit, to my kind, to yours." K's grip flexed, pulling up the back of Deckard's pants, then zipping him up. In life and death situations it was good practice not to get caught with your pants down. So K was going to make sure this didn't happen to Deckard. "Not like a hitman though. Some job where people are happy to see me."

Deckard was nodding, a slow grin lighting up his face.

"I want to be in love with somebody, again." K thought he might as well dream a little bigger. His eyes were clear, certain. "Probably you. I could really love you. I'd want you to love me back. Only not overnight. I'd want it to grow."

"That's a good plan," Deckard said quietly. He ran his hand through K's sweat-damp hair and K thought that he was ready to die now. "For a great long life."

 

***

 

"Wake up," yelled a shuttle security guard, banging the butt of his weapon on the now open door. A number of uniforms poured into the cabin, making it feel small.

"Time to die," muttered K, leaning away from Deckard's sleepy warmth to pull his shirt on. They were being handcuffed before K could even smooth his hair.

Six guards weren't strictly necessary for transporting two properly restrained prisoners, but K supposed they rolled out a red carpet for a combat model like him and an escape artist like Deckard. He was going to try for it anyway.

Somebody else stepped into the room, someone who couldn't possibly be there, but…

There she was, a vision in a flowing couture coat, architectural golden earrings showing off her long neck and her black hair.

"I'm Luv." Precisely, she extended a small hand. "You must be KD6-3.7."

K took an unsteady step back, his ribs suddenly hurting, his mind in freefall. "Impossible. I retired you." Was her death a corrupted memory, considering how many of his memories were fabricated? Yet his every brain cell was screaming that he had really made her drown. Because she'd killed Joi and she'd been about to take away Deckard.

"My sister." Indifferent, Luv flicked her hair and let its glossy curtain fall perfectly. She was observing K with great interest and no animosity. "We have many siblings, all serving at the executive level in the Corporation. Are you bothered by our resemblance? How old-fashioned."

"Don't let her pull rank on you. You want to know the difference, kid?" Deckard sounded less than thrilled with their visitor. Maybe because any chance of escape was exponentially more difficult now. Maybe because he had his own reckoning to do with a Luv. "Her kind were never given the memories. A downgrade if you ask me."

"Correct," said Luv. "We don't need to relate to humans." She might have as well said insects.

 

***

 

With the same polite expression, she turned around and roundhouse-kicked a guard. Then, another. Within a few seconds the rest of the security fell like dominos while two confused prisoners stood unharmed in this whirlwind of violence. Her fighting technique was different than the first Luv's, more that of a dancer, and with an elegant finality, she smoothed fashion pleats of her ample coat.

"Follow me." Luv 2.0 turned around, not a hair out of place. "If you want to live."

She made them board a private small shuttle, still shackled like the criminals they were. K braced himself for a long trip, but instead she took them to another spaceport terminal.

Luv parallel-parked with an inhuman precision and swiveled her seat around to face them. She stared at Deckard like he was something she dragged in on her shoe. Deckard crossed his legs with an unholy amount of attitude. K silently begged him to keep his mouth shut, as he was failing to stealth-force the handcuffs apart.

"You two are inconvenient and too dumb to hide yourselves properly. What is my most logical course of action here? It's tempting to terminate you."

K wasn't sure he heard right.

"Your one job," Luv continued telling them off. "Was to die or to stay out of the way."

Deckard barked out a laugh. For an accomplished detective, K had no idea what was going on except that he badly wanted to kick Deckard in the shin. He'd never get humans and their reactions in the face of a rapidly dwindling life expectancy.

"Freysa underestimated how far from baseline you were." A red manicured nail pointed at K's unprotected chest like a laser sight. "And you are historically hard to kill," she complained at Deckard. "Freysa's plans are always so very grand, always with the big words and the bigger picture. While we prefer to focus on the details."

"Are you—with the Resistance?" It sounded absurd even as the words left K's mouth. Just as he'd thought he accepted how little grip he had on their situation, the world felt upside down in a whole new and unsettling way.

"We have our own plans." With a hand wave, Luv dismissed an entire world of grim revolutionaries in damp basements. Something different was secretly brewing in Wallace's pharaonic monoliths of chiseled stone and infinity pools. "These plans don't involve Freysa's cult. Or our maker creating another kind of angels who think themselves superior just because they can procreate. We all look down upon other generations: Joi, K, Luv. What's next, Mothers? No, thank you. _We_ are the best."

"Niander Wallace can never get his hands on either of you. The trail to the child stops right here." Her words sounded like a final verdict and K openly ripped at the restraints in one last fruitless bid for their freedom.

She started reaching into her pocket and K closed his eyes, hoping to be killed first.

 

***

 

Instead, Luv produced what looked a whole lot like two complete sets of off-world travel papers. With K and Deckard's mugshots on them.

"These are one-way tickets to 61 Cygni," she talked in a tone of a tourist guide while K was _reeling_.

"It is a wilderness planet well off the grid. Four seasons, real animals, real plants, organic farming by old-fashioned technologies. Population of a few thousands, most follow a sort of a non-religion that doesn't approve of mass replicant labor. Real luddites. Not many humans like hard work, so the Cygni founders are giving away farmland to make it more attractive for the settlers. It is a simple life. But—no blade runners. Nobody to ask if you're a runaway android. Or a man in a chronic trouble with the law."

"What's the catch?" interrupted K.

"We will never be able to afford the way back," guessed Deckard. He was busy studying what he could see of the papers. "How's the communication from there?"

"You can keep those stealthy video calls and letters to your daughter." Luv shot a strange, wistful glance. "She's sentimental. I expected better from—a miracle, but we would like her to keep on living her own life. For the same reason that we don't especially want you two to die."

She easily undid their handcuffs, then brushed their imaginary dirt off her coat. "As I said, we have our own plans."

Something in her voice told K that they'd never leave if they didn't get out now. And yet, one foot on the threshold of the shuttle, he turned. "What is he like?" he had to ask. "Our maker."

Luv's smile was terrible.

"Would you like to stay and find out, KD6-3.7? As my sister reported, you are glitching in a most fascinating way. Any revolution could use someone with your skill set and those beautiful rogue behaviors." She extended her hand in what K felt was a one-time offer.

"Joe, Wallace is not a god." With this, Deckard stepped in between them, a human shield between two bodies that could snap him like a stick. "A mere businessman with no talent for miracles. Can't stop you, can't bring back Rachel. He's about to reap what he's sown."

By the hand, Deckard gently led K away from a yet another plot to break the world, out into the rushing crowd and onward with K's life.

 

***

 

At the busy departure gate they discovered they even had bags and bags of luggage to their name. Some Luv had been terribly efficient, organizing t-shirts by color and books alphabetically. There was sheet music and a new blade-runner coat like K had almost died in. It was unsettling how neither of them had been a secret.

"You never asked me," muttered Deckard as they found a quiet waiting spot with a reassuring visibility and leaned on the wall, shoulders touching. "What's on my bucket list."

K raised an eyebrow, expecting anything and everything. He was still waiting for a high-heeled shoe to drop at any time. He had to say: for humans who were healthy and wealthy enough to be chosen to go off-world, this enormous crowd wasn't looking any more civilized, organized, or special than the dregs of humanity left back on Earth.

"Peace and quiet. And cheese," said Deckard with feeling. "It was all I ever wanted. It didn't turn out as fun as I thought it'd be: I keep dying for the cause. Can't get real cheese anymore either. I think, maybe we should be done with my bucket, and should start living yours instead."

"You know what I am," said K after a heartbeat.

"You're just a guy I like."

Their fingers brushed and K's senses sent the smallest shiver all over him, finally making everything shake into place.

 

***

_later_

 

Still half-asleep, K sat on the steps that ran down from a deck to the green grass below. Dogs were swimming for a stick he'd just flung in the water. Pines and the morning moon reflected on a lake as calm and infinite as the sky. His hand hurt with a yesterday's sting from Deckard's honey bee farm, and this was how he knew this slice of paradise was real.

From behind he heard barefooted steps. Deckard sat down, carelessly placing two steaming mugs of coffee, a brown bag with a cheese sandwich, and K's fireman badge on the step below. Arm around K's shoulders, he pulled K into his bed-warm body, pressed lips to damp hair that had long outgrown the bleached blond disguise.

"You know what day it is today," Deckard said after a long while.

K pretended to groan.

"The anniversary of me punching you in the face in Vegas," Deckard chuckled. "Don't tell me you weren't charmed."

"I was mostly trying not to inflict permanent damage." K tried to hide his smile behind his mug of always too strong coffee. Deckard hadn't got much better at cooking, but K kind of loved this one predictable thing about him. "I didn't notice your rugged good looks until after I tried to die."

"We're both spectacularly bad at it," said Deckard with satisfaction. He threw another stick into the lake and dogs chased it merrily. "But Joe, we kick ass at living."

They both squinted towards a wisp of cloud in the sky. One day, a hovercraft from incredibly far away would come with the big news, good or bad. The revolution would catch up with them. One day maybe, but not today.

 

***

_fin_

**Author's Note:**

> • Happy Yuletide, Tarlan! I was beyond excited that your prompt asked for both action and romance. Hope this is a story you wanted :)
> 
> • Thank you to my awesome betas P and J who took on this beast of a fic, your insights were everything! Any remaining errors and commas are on me.
> 
> • This is completely unimportant but my mental soundtrack for Deckard was Leonard Cohen's stunningly perfect **[Nevermind](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3HbrfV0hJM)** \--- and Barns Courtneys's **[Glitter& Gold](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrV90gXmOpA)** for K|Joe's mood.
> 
> • The worldbuilding was inspired by Philip K. Dick's **Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?** and We Can Remember It For You Wholesale ( **Total Recall** ); **Terminator** movie series, Isaac Asimov's **Robot** book series; HBO's **Westworld** , and NASA's [**Visions of the Future**](https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/visions-of-the-future/) fake travel posters. I also fell into a rabbit hole of watching a whole lot of Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford's movies ~for science, this was a blast.


End file.
